Canadians to US: our healthcare just fine

Sunday

Mar 29, 2009 at 1:07 PM

“Canadacare may have killed Natasha,” screamed a headline in the New York Post. “Was Canada’s healthcare the problem?”asked another in the Chicago Tribune. Some Montreal doctors comment on the debate that asks if Canada’s “socialized medicine” killed actress Natasha Richardson after she hit her head skiing.

MONTREAL — Some Montreal doctors added a dose of realism Saturday to the fiery debate south of the border that asked if Canada’s “socialized medicine” killed actress Natasha Richardson after she hit her head skiing on Mont Tremblant March 16.

“Canadacare may have killed Natasha,” screamed a headline in the New York Post. “Was Canada’s healthcare the problem?”asked another in the Chicago Tribune.

The implication “is totally unjustified,” said Paul Saba, an emergency room doctor at Lachine Hospital and co-president of the Coalition of Physicians for Social Justice.

He flatly rejected the notion that a lack of funding for overall public health care contributes to fatal head injuries like the one that claimed the life of Richardson, the wife of actor Liam Neeson and the daughter of legendary actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Saba stressed he was not commenting specifically about Richardson, but “any patient’s refusal of treatment is crucial” to the outcome. So is not wearing a ski helmet, he added.

Richardson, 45, wasn’t wearing a ski helmet when she fell around noon and was walking and talking afterward. She also refused an ambulance that came for her about 45 minutes later.

Another ambulance was called about 3 p.m. and she arrived at the Centre Hospitalier Laurentien in Ste. Agathe, 42 kilometres away, nearly four hours after her fall.

Two hours afterward she was transferred by ambulance to the trauma centre at Montreal’s Hepital du Sacre-Coeur, 83 kilometres southeast of Ste. Agathe.

An article in U.S. newspapers by Cory Franklin, a physician who lives in Wilmette, Ill., took sharp aim at the lack of CT brain scanners in some Quebec hospitals and the lack of helicopter ambulances.

“With prompt diagnosis by CT scan, and surgery to drain the blood, most patients survive,” Franklin wrote. “Could Richardson have received this care? Where it happened in Canada, no. In many American resorts, yes.”

But a simple phone call Saturday to the radiology department at the Centre Hospitalier Laurentien revealed that the hospital is in fact equipped with a CT scanner.

It was not known, however, whether the device, which can cost $1 million, was used on Richardson.

As for the need for a medical helicopter, Saba said that while it would be helpful in longer-range cases, it might not have saved the actress.

Mont Tremblant is relatively close by road to Montreal’s trauma hospitals, he noted.

"“And with all due to respect to the Americans, we don’t need any lessons from them about health care,” Brunet added. Canada doesn’t “have 50 million people without health care like they do," said Paul Brunet, president of the Council for the protection of patients.